How Conversations with a Psychic Shaped My Novel

Remember the Moon began from a seed of an idea I had about a dead man's conversation with his alive wife through a psychic. I thought it would be funny to have the psychic talking in cryptic symbols - roses, rings, colors that are meant to contain profound messages to us living, while the dead husband is up there pulling out his (proverbial) hair because all he wants is for the psychic to speak clearly so he can tell his wife something important, like to buy Apple stock. Instead the wife gets "did your husband like apples?" and the wife exclaims "Yes, they were his favorite fruit!" and is deliriously happy.Not that I wanted to make fun of psychics, just that in all my experience of trying to speak to Arron through one, I always thought he would be frustrated at the lack of complexity and detail that was being conveyed. He was a man who thrived on words and loved twisting them into knots, saying them backwards, reading mirrored words as easily and as quickly as most people read the regular way.In writing Remember The Moon, I more or less commandeered Lisa Fox, the-psychic-who-found-me-in-a-coffee-shop, for many hours, asking Arron questions to which I got some interesting answers, many of which have been reprised in the book. My notes from Lisa's sessions are copious. I typed as she spoke. Discussions included the levels of "awareness" in the afterlife, a soul's purpose, what Arron's job was in the afterlife, the idea that everything in life has a consequence in the afterlife, what happens to "bad" souls, among a host of other things. It was an amazing experience for both Lisa and I.The kids were part of one or two of the sessions one of which made its way into the chapter in the book, "Haircut," much of which is really more memoir than fiction.Many of the thoughts and ideas about the afterlife that I riff on in the book were mashed from a variety of other sources as well: psychics Sylvia Brown and James Van Praag, Journey of Souls, Many Lives, Many Masters, Entangled Minds, among many others.But a curious thing happened as I wrote the book: my fascination with psychics wore off. I'm not sure why exactly. Perhaps in writing that scene with the husband and wife trying to communicate through the psychic I saw comedy where I had not seen it before. Or maybe I saw my own desperation during that time, a time when I was so longing for a magical connection with Arron, I see now it was like grasping a blade of grass in an effort to keep from falling.And yet, in it's own magical way, that blade of grass did keep me from falling. It gave me hope that connection and communication with the dead might be possible, that magic was possible, that really, anything was possible.And magic did happen and continues to happen. Remember The Moon is proof of that.